Top Cambridge school administrator under fire for miscitation

By Sara Feijosfeijo@wickedlocal.com

Wednesday

May 20, 2015 at 11:35 AM

Cambridge Public Schools are adding explicit definitions of plagiarism and proper citation to the student and employee handbooks after a top Cambridge Public Schools administrator improperly cited work in two separate district documents.

Jessica L. Huizenga, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, and her team compiled two informational documents explaining the district’s curriculum review process, but some paragraphs weren’t cited.

“When it was brought to my attention, I immediately corrected the documents,” Huizenga told the Chronicle. “There’s a lot of proofreading and passing documents back and forth, and once that was made evident I corrected it. There was never an intent to deceive or plagiarize.”

According to Huizenga, it is routine for educators to consult and use multiple educational resources and materials. She said she references the authors of the work in the opening paragraph, but she should have also cited them in each sub-section.

“There were some insufficient citations, many fall under common knowledge [in the education field],” Huizenga said. “I take my work very seriously and integrity is very important. I’m going to learn from this and make sure this never happens again.”

Among the miscited text is an explanation of the backwards design process from “Understanding by Design.” The text used in the CPS document can be found on different websites.

Grant Wiggins, co-author of “Understanding by Design” and consultant to the Cambridge Public Schools, said the term backwards design is widely known in the field of education and it has become a generic term that does not need to be referenced.

“Anyone who has been involved in the curriculum review and re-design process of the past two years knows that these terms involve our work,” Wiggins wrote to CPS. “So, no one on the faculty would think for a moment that this was being passed off as Jessica’s and the team’s original work. On the contrary: we bring tools and design process so that local teams can create their own curricula, to high standards. So, the final documents are the work of Jessica and the design teams – that’s our approach, by design, to ensure ownership.”

According to Superintendent Jeff Young, the school district will hold trainings on proper citation for all CPS administrators. He said he would also look into how documents are being vetted.

“I believe Dr. Huizenga made a mistake. She has apologized for it and she has corrected it. I have confidence in her,” Young said. “She probably cited carefully in some instances and made errors of citations in others.”

In a May 1 memo to the School Committee, Young wrote that the school administration would update student and employee handbooks and policies to include an explicit definition of plagiarism.

“Although we currently spell out consequences for students in our documents, these booklets do not contain an explicit definition,” Young wrote. “It is important that we develop clear and equitable standards for students and staff, so that all individuals are held accountable to the same clearly articulated standard.”

But some members of the school community feel the issue could have been handled better. School Committee member Patricia Nolan said the matter should have been immediately resolved with a “clear apology, a strong statement of the need for proper citations and upholding professional standards and assurance that appropriate consequences would be given for any lapses.”

Instead, she said, there was a dismissal of the seriousness of the issue and no consequences.

“Our district teaches plagiarism starting in elementary school. Professional standards are clear that plagiarism, by definition, is unethical—which violates our staff code of conduct. And our Acceptable Use Policy specifically mentions plagiarism as prohibited,” Nolan said. “The suggestion that staff need training on what constitutes plagiarism is insulting to every professional we employ.”

“We should make it very clear that we take plagiarism seriously and that staff will be held to higher standards than students,” Nolan added. “Otherwise we are teaching our students and staff that there are double standards.”

Nolan said she believes it is unlikely that the holders of the copyrighted material not properly cited in the district’s documents would take legal action, but “having such material in district brochures puts the district at risk.”

Huizenga is also under fire for using information in her personal blog from an article in the Cambridge Day without properly citing the author. The article paraphrased Huizenga’s comments to the School Committee. Young said the school would not get involved regarding the blog issue because it is not a school blog.

“They were my words,” Huizenga said of the content that was lifted from the Cambridge Day article. “That was my presentation with my team and that was our work. It will never happen again.”

Leslie Brunetta, a volunteer in the public schools and an involved parent of two CPS alums, also feels Young handled the case incorrectly.

“He’s insulted the intelligence of the School Committee and the intelligence of all of the school district community members by trying to convince us that this is not plagiarism,” Brunetta said. “Anyone who’s gotten past about eighth grade knows exactly what plagiarism is. This is plagiarism.”

Young said two plagiarism experts— Wiggins and Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center for Academic Integrity—have looked at the full documents and said this was a case of improperly cited work.

In a letter to CPS, Fishman stated, “With regard to citation errors and plagiarism, there is a wide spectrum and certainly not all are created equal. The main defining characteristic in cases that we’d classify as citation errors is that there is an attempt to identify the source of the information rather than to make it appear as if the words or ideas are those of the person using them in the document.”

Mayor David Maher said he feels the issue has been properly handled.

“What we’re saying is this is not a doctoral dissertation,” Maher said. “Was it clumsy? Perhaps. Was it sloppy? Perhaps. Should this woman lose her job or professional career by this? I don’t think so.”

Contact Chronicle reporter Sara Feijo at sfeijo@wickedlocal.com or follow her on Twitter at @s_fjo.